Everything that a big, bad wolf could want

on the perils of rewilding, and why you shouldn't buy a diamond

This will be for my subscribers, two stories.

First, it seems that a rewilding program of wolves in Colorado has hit something of a snag.

“Less than nine months after the first gray wolves were released into the wild in Colorado amid widespread attention as part of an ambitious reintroduction program, officials are now scrambling to capture and move the state’s first breeding pack.

The announcement by Colorado Parks and Wildlife officials on Tuesday that two of the 10 wolves that were released — along with three pups that they had this year — would be moved from their current area came after the animals were accused of attacking nearby livestock.”

The Colorado wolves have not made friends with their new neighbors and are now being chased out of town.

This is a setback, as wolves (and beavers) have been in a way the poster animals for the rewilding projects of recent decades.

Photo by M L on Unsplash

Their reintroduction to Yellowstone National Park in the mid-1990s (after decades’ absence), has been credited with creating a Trophic Cascade. This is the sequence of changes in an ecosystem caused by a change in the food chain.

In Yellowstone, wolves helped keep down the elk population. This meant the willow trees (that elks eat) were allowed to regenerate, providing more wood for beaver dams. More beaver dams, meant more meadows and food for other creatures - and less flooding.

Rewilding, especially bringing back predators like wolves, has been controversial. It wasn’t necessarily clear how it would unfold. Would the wolves stay in the park? Even advocates of the wolf plan weren’t certain. But the change to the ecosystem turned out even better than expected. Plans proceeded to rewild wolves in other parts of the world.

However, as we’ve seen in Colorado, people are not always thrilled to have an apex predator show up in their community. In Yellowstone, the wolves are protected in the park - not so much if they venture beyond it. Yellowstone wolves have been shot when they strayed outside the park boundaries.

But ‘rewilding’ is a slippery concept, with the idea it’s possible for us to somehow return a landscape to a natural state. This raises the question: natural for when? Landscapes and ecosystems have always evolved. What point in history are you trying to recreate with your balance of animals?

It should be noted that simply “letting animals go” (something else people do, even when those creatures are not in any way native) is not “rewilding”. Like the prize idiots who threw a bunch of living crustaceans into the water near England.

“Zhixiong Li and Ni Li helped throw live crabs and lobsters into the sea off Brighton as part of a “life release” ceremony in 2015, a court has heard.

The pair were part of a group of almost 1,000 people celebrating the visit of the Taiwanese Buddhist master Hai Tao.

Their ritual was performed in the belief that returning animals to the wild is good karma. But because the crustaceans were not native species, they threatened other marine life and government agencies had to spend thousands of pounds in an attempt to recapture the shellfish, offering fishermen a bounty to reel them in.”

(Hai Tao’s followers previously released a bunch of pythons in the mountains in Taiwan. It is apparently their thing.)

Most releases are not so dramatic. People decide to release their goldfish into a local pond or lake. What’s the harm? It’s a tiny little fish. And then the thing grows to be 18 inches long and weighs 9 pounds. (I once wrote about the perils of the invasive goldfish for the Atlantic).

When it comes to “rewilding” animals that we can say are supposed to be there, beaver rewilding goes back earlier than that of wolves, starting in different places before the Second World War, and famously featuring the “Beaver Drop” in Idaho in the late 1940s. Sedated beavers were put into spring loaded crates, with parachutes attached, and dropped from planes, with the hope they would repopulate the waterways where their ancestors had been hunted to extinction. They did. A groggy beaver would come to in a box—the door popped open on landing–and stagger to the nearest stream. (Beavers are simultaneously very dim and driven by a powerful instinct. If you play a recording of running water, a beaver will start building a dam. They know their life’s purpose).